'Israel' funded $46.5M campaign to shape AI responses on Gaza war: report

• A report alleges the 'Israeli' government spent $46.5 million on a network of websites designed to influence how AI systems answer questions about the Gaza war.
• The campaign reportedly used content optimized for AI training datasets and search engines, with some chatbots already citing the websites.

The 'Israeli' government spent tens of millions of dollars on a digital influence campaign aimed at shaping how artificial intelligence systems respond to questions about the Gaza war, according to an investigation published Tuesday by Drop Site News.

The report alleges that Brad Parscale, US President Donald Trump's former campaign manager, and his firm, Clock Tower X, were awarded a $46.5 million contract to build a network of websites promoting pro-'Israeli' narratives and influencing AI platforms, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity.

According to documents cited by Drop Site, Clock Tower X published hundreds of articles across multiple websites covering the Gaza war, 'Israel's' military operations, and US-'Israeli' relations.

The report said the campaign was designed to influence responses generated by large language models by producing content optimized for search engines and AI training datasets, a tactic sometimes referred to as "LLM poisoning."

Although the websites reportedly attracted limited direct traffic, they were intended to be indexed by search engines and scraped by AI systems.

Among the websites identified were Allyvia.org, FactSignal.org, and Paxpoint.org, which promoted closer US-'Israeli' military cooperation, defended 'Israel's' actions in Gaza, challenged allegations of genocide, and presented pro-'Israeli' perspectives.

Drop Site reported that several AI systems had already referenced the websites.

In one test cited by the investigation, Perplexity linked to Allyvia.org when answering a question about US military cooperation with 'Israel', while Microsoft's Copilot also cited websites connected to Clock Tower X.

The report added that content from the network had entered AI training datasets through Common Crawl, a widely used web archive that supplies data for training large language models.

According to the investigation, the 10 websites linked to Clock Tower X were crawled hundreds of times between January and June 2026, increasing their likelihood of appearing in AI-generated responses.

Hervé Letoqueux, chief executive officer of Check First, a digital disinformation research organization, said Common Crawl's widespread use in AI training makes it an attractive target for efforts to influence chatbot outputs.

"Common Crawl is widely used in the world of data science for training LLMs, which also means that actors want to manipulate the answers in their favour," Letoqueux said.

After reviewing the websites, he said their moderate tone, structured formatting, and reliance on cited sources could make them particularly effective because AI chatbots often present multiple perspectives on contested issues.

The report also noted that public support for 'Israel' in the United States has declined since the start of the Gaza war, which it said has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians, including among some groups that have traditionally been strong supporters of 'Israel'.